Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery

by Rosalie Knecht

  Vera Kelly

  is not a

  Mystery

  ROSALIE

  KNECHT

  For Ambrose

  I

  AUGUST 1967

  BROOKLYN, NY

  CHAPTER 1

  The morning after Jane left me, I woke in a Russian diner that overlooked the boardwalk at Brighton Beach, sitting upright in the corner of a booth. I had always been grateful for an all-night restaurant. A waitress with red cheeks was refilling the cup of coffee in front of me and rotating the plate with its scraps of corned beef, clearing her throat politely. I sat up and thanked her. Through the fogged glass I could see the gray ocean, pale and soft, meeting a paler sky. Down the beach, the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island was coming out of the predawn dark. I put my hand over the mug and the waitress moved away.

  By my watch, it was 6:40 in the morning, which meant that it was almost twenty-four hours now since things had begun to go wrong. Jane had said, “I’m tired of waiting for you to want me here.” She was standing in the hallway between my bedroom and the second-floor bathroom, holding the powder-pink bag with her makeup and toothbrush in it, wearing my dressing gown. “I don’t have to move in. But you hardly talk to me.”

  “I talk to you.”

  “About what? About nothing. I turn around and you’ve left the room.”

  “I talk to you.”

  “You say clever things, and when I try to answer you seriously, you make clever jokes.”

  “You can move in, then,” I said, becoming desperate. “You can move in. I’ve been stupid.”

  “You know I can’t. You would make me miserable.” She waved her hand toward the hall, the stairs. “You practically faint when I leave my shoes on the rug.” She brushed past me to my room. I leaned in the doorway and watched her getting dressed. My eyes were stinging, my nose was stinging. I sneezed. “I have a class to teach,” she said. “I’ll get the rest of my things later.”

  “Don’t go,” I said. I said it into my cupped hand.

  She put her hand on my shoulder. “You’re a nice girl, Vera,” she said. “But you’re impossible.”

  Jane was noisy and hot, with a bright face; after she left, the house felt like a meat locker, despite the August weather. I went for a long, blurry walk. When I got home, I stood in the kitchen for fifteen minutes, looking at the wall clock, and then had a whiskey and sat in the garden. The roses were blooming for the second time that year. They were yellow washed with pink, like sherbet melting in a bowl of punch. The starling who lived under the eaves of the shed came out to scream at me. He thought the yard was his. It was ten o’clock in the morning. It was time to go to work.

  I was one of the film editors for the news broadcast at the WKNY station near the Battery. I started leaking tears on the Q train over the river, because the view was too big and I could see the trees on Governors Island, fizzing and dark in the sun. The summer would be over soon.

  I made it to my break before I called her. She had a telephone in her office at Brooklyn College, and she would have just finished her afternoon Romantic poetry class. It rang twice and she picked up.

  “Jane?” I said. “I think this is a mistake. I’ll make it up to you.”

  “Vera, it’s too late. All right? I’m sorry.”

  “What do you mean?” I was alone in the editing room, and I was keeping my voice low. George Kepler must have been listening from the switchboard, or patched in from another office. Later, I wondered if he had been listening to my calls for months, ever since he had cornered me at the bar where the editors and runners went after the evening broadcast and I had pushed him off, laughing.

  “What do you mean, it’s too late?” I said. “Is there someone else?”

  She said nothing.

  “Christ, Jane. Is there? There is?”

  “I didn’t plan it this way.”

  I hung up and tried not to fall apart. My eyes were rattling in my head. I went to the stairwell and smoked a cigarette, and then another. I returned to the editing room. My supervisor, Mr. Anderson, was there, standing with George Kepler, who looked very pleased.

  “Vera, I need to speak with you,” Mr. Anderson said, and turned to indicate his office with a sweep of his hand, as if we were going to the theater together.

  “What for?” I said. George Kepler turned and walked away. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up.

  “Privately,” he said.

  He shut the door behind us and pointed to a chair. His windows looked out on a post office lot, with a huge doorway to an underground garage where fleets of mail trucks came and went in the gloom. Sunlight never touched the street in this part of town.

  “There’s a character clause in your employment contract,” he said. He looked at me as if I should grasp his meaning, and then I did. A mask descended. I tried to keep my voice calm.

  “Can you make yourself clear?” I said. “I have a lot of work to do.”

  “No, you don’t,” he said. “You’re in violation of your employment contract. We can’t keep people on staff who live that way.” He pushed back from his desk and began searching in his coat pocket for his matches. His color was rising and he wouldn’t look at me. “I told them you would be a problem,” he said, “when they first promoted you from the floor. It was obvious to anyone with eyes. They didn’t listen to me.” He found the matches. “We’ll mail you your last paycheck.”

  “You’ll take his word?” I said. “George Kepler is the worst editor you have. He takes twice as long as the rest of us.”

  “You’re wasting my time,” he said.

  There were two more editors at their desks when I came back to get my things. George was standing at the side of the room, watching one of the monitors, but he looked over and I stared until he turned away. I packed everything into my purse and a shopping bag I found in the lounge. I had never kept much at my desk anyway. There was a tense silence while I sifted through my papers. The youngest editor, a sweet boy named Carl, was concerned. “Going somewhere?” he said.

  “Nice to know you, Carl,” I said. It had been. He looked surprised.

  And then I was back out on the street again. The awful thing was that it was a beautiful day, one of those slow, rich August afternoons when the light hit the Battery like the inside of a cathedral. I walked slowly, having nowhere I wanted to be, now or for the foreseeable future. A man at a hot dog cart was having an argument with a seagull, which was hopping away with half a pretzel. Two children were racing each other to the railing overlooking the water. The leaves in a stand of little birches were all alight and shivering. I had a pain in my chest, as if I had swallowed too much air. I walked as far as the Staten Island Ferry Terminal and sat on a bench for a long time, doing nothing at all and not seeing much, until it occurred to me that I could smoke. That was something to do. I smoked three or four cigarettes. The six o’clock ferry was leaving, and I got on and went to Staten Island and back, just to feel the sea wind in my hair. I stood at the railing with a crowd of happy visitors taking pictures of the Statue of Liberty and tried to think what to do with myself.

  Darkness fell, but made it no easier to imagine going home. I loved my house. I had bought it with cash, all the money from the Argentina job, and I had spent months buying secondhand furniture and painting the windows and trim, learning everything it needed. I couldn’t stand the thought of contaminating it with myself, in the state I was in.

  Instead I went to the Bracken, my old haunt in the Village. Maxine the bartender was there, making four drinks at once to show off. “Haven’t seen you in a while,” she said. It was early and the piano player wasn’t in yet.

  “I was shacked up for a little while,” I sa
id.

  “That’s the trouble,” Max said. “Happy girls don’t go to bars.” She distributed the drinks at the other end of the bar and then came back and made me a gimlet. She had done her mascara in the new way, with the lower lashes so heavy and dark that she looked like a sleepy doll. I told her I liked it, and she turned so she could wink over her shoulder. Max always flirted with me.

  “I got fired,” I said, experimentally. It had been a year since I stopped my old line of work, but it was still a habit to be closemouthed.

  “Oh, Vera, darling.” The eyes went round. She squeezed my forearm. She didn’t ask what for, and I didn’t tell her.

  When the place started to fill up, I left. It was lack of imagination that put me on the B train at West Fourth Street, the train that would take me home, and cowardice that kept me on it, sliding past my own grimy platform, down to Brighton Beach.

  CHAPTER 2

  I left the luncheonette and walked on the boardwalk. The morning breeze came in from the ocean, lifting my hair off my neck. I liked this beach because the water was so calm. The scythe of the Rockaways protected it from the deep Atlantic currents, and you could bob here peacefully, as if on a Catskills lake. The neat, interlocking planks blurred together in the distance. There was nothing on the sand but a straggling border of seaweed that marked the last high tide. A ship at anchor waited on the horizon.

  I had almost no savings. The house had taken everything, and I hadn’t made much at the station. I had property taxes to pay, repairs that still had to be made. I walked past shuttered restaurants, overturned terrace tables, a silent gallery of shops whose signs offered hot dogs and fried clams, fountain sodas, banana splits. The abbreviated belfry of a little Catholic church, blotted with pigeons, kept watch behind an ice cream stand.

  I did try, Jane. I caught my hair in one hand, fishing in my pocket for bobby pins. Across the water, the dark bulk of New Jersey was lightening as the sun rose. I did try. Just by having you in my house—by saying those things to you, those clever remarks. I made dinner for you. I sat near you and read books. You left clouds of perfume in my bedroom, peeled apples over my sink. If there was something more than that, I couldn’t think what it was, what she had wanted from me. She had looked at me searchingly sometimes, early in the morning, and it made me feel sad, diminished. When she was comfortable and happy in the evenings, after a drink or two, she acted sometimes like a child, jostling me with jokes, her voice sugary, and while I could tell I was meant to like this, to be charmed by it, I didn’t and wasn’t. I went cold instead. Maybe she had sensed that too.

  The other woman, where had she come from? Another professor, a graduate student? Jane was invited to dinner parties sometimes with the artists and writers and critics who circulated in her scene, and she would invite me and I usually said no, that I was too tired to talk to strangers or take the train a long way. That looked like a mistake now. I crumpled, and then got angry. Incredible nerve, to accuse me of being cold and then cheat and lie, as if I had no feelings at all. My heart was racing. I pictured her making it with some girl in a cab while I sat at home reading a stupid novel.

  The day around me was beginning to look very plain, midmorning on an overcast Thursday late in the summer. I lit a cigarette and turned off the boardwalk onto one of the side streets that led to the elevated tracks of the Q. It was time to go home.

  I picked up the newspaper off the front stoop and let myself in. The clock ticked in the kitchen. It was the time of day when the back of the house was the brightest. I made coffee in the Bialetti and turned to the classifieds. In the women’s section, columns of ads seeking office girls and waitresses; “pleasant public manner,” “well-groomed.” Salaries that wouldn’t fix the windows or pay the gas bill for the winter. Jane had told me she saw picketers in front of the New York Times Building a few weeks ago because of the sex-segregated classifieds. I hadn’t gotten the film-editing job through an ad, of course. I had been hired for a woman’s job in the front office and then had insinuated myself into the editing room. That was the only way I had ever managed to make a living: crossing a line bit by bit, as if by accident. I thought of doing it again, starting over in a secretarial position and then casting about to see if I could get something better. But I had no references now. People talked. I couldn’t be sure who knew about me. And even if I managed it, they would make undiscussed exceptions for me, do funny things with my title. I wouldn’t make much more than the girls answering the phones. I put my head in my hands.

  I went into the small back garden and sat for a while, staring at the fence overgrown with morning glories and, beyond it, the windows of the next house. Another day turning. Hours would pass and the yard would grow dark and I wouldn’t have spoken to another soul. I thought of my mother. I had seen her in the spring, around Easter time, for the first time in years. I had spent an afternoon and a night in the old family house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, the redbrick colonial with the hedge and flowers. We had been polite to each other. My mother kept sizing me up, always pausing in the doorway of the room I was in before entering, asking discreet questions, as if I were a fellow guest in a hotel. When I was a child, she didn’t know what to do with me because I was chaotic and ignorant, like all children; when I was a teenager, she didn’t know what to do with me because I was hostile and sad, like most teenagers. The death of my father when I was twelve had left us marooned on separate islands. My appearance in her home in the form of a grown woman caught her off guard, as if it were a disguise I had unfairly put on. She seemed relieved to see me go.

  I went through the math again: the windows, the wiring, the gas bill, the taxes.

  And then, a trace of an idea. I had been carting around a bundle of Raymond Chandler paperbacks from boardinghouse to apartment to house since my first days in New York. Philip Marlowe, private eye.

  Was it so impossible? It was what other ex-spies did. All it took was an office, ads in the paper, referrals. I had the training. I thought of Gerry, my old handler when I worked for the CIA, and laughed. I’d told him I didn’t want to do this kind of work anymore. But this would be different.

  Half of my remaining money went to pay for the first and last months’ rent for a small office just off Union Square. The office contained a desk with a scarred top, which I covered with a blotter; a stopped clock, which had been screwed directly into the wall and couldn’t be removed; and a cast-iron radiator beneath a broad window, the panes of glass old and rippling like water. Through this window I could see the roof of the neighboring building, where a woman came once a day with a basket of laundry to hang up, and part of a synagogue at the end of the block. There was a tiny room in front of the office that the landlord called a “vestibule,” which fit one stuffed chair, an end table, and a lamp, and would have to be good enough for a waiting room. The landlord suggested that with some modifications, this outer room could be where my “girl” would sit. I said I would have to be my own girl. He asked what my business was. “Consulting,” I said.

  By this time, my last check from the television station had arrived by mail, as they said it would, and I cashed it all out to put ads in the Post and the Times, paying for six weeks up front.

  PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS

  SURVEILLANCE—INQUIRIES OF ALL KINDS

  Discreet, professional service

  Trained in counterintelligence

  English, Spanish & French

  Underneath, the number of my telephone answering service, which had instructions to put calls through during the hours I would be in the office. When I first saw the ad printed, the absurdity of the whole idea hit me, but then it ebbed. It was insane to imagine that anyone would hire a woman private investigator, but it was also insane to imagine that any of the other things that had happened to me in the last five years might happen. And things were changing; or at any rate, it looked like they might. Girls only a few years younger than I was seemed louder, freer, in the streets and on the trains. I had read about Haight-Ashbur
y that summer, and had recoiled. I knew I was supposed to see freedom in the whole enterprise, but I didn’t; I saw a whole lot of people acting like children, as if childhood weren’t a state of awful helplessness and dependence.

  Once the ads were running, I started spending my days in the office. Easier there than at home. There was work to do, anyway. I gave the wood floor a deep scrubbing, which it obviously hadn’t had in a long time, and twisted out the window to clean the outside of the glass. I washed the walls and went around all the gaps and joints of the desk with a pin, levering out the dirt. I brought in a radio so it wouldn’t be so quiet. On the third day I got a crank call, and on the fourth day, an obscene one. It was still hot in the mornings; the leaves of a young sycamore just visible over the wall of the synagogue had given up and turned brown. On the fifth day a man with a Long Island accent called and asked me to find out why his wife had left him.

  “Your wife?”

  “She took the car,” he said.

  “She stole your car?”

  “It’s her name on the title. She had it for shopping and summer weekends. Down at the beach, you know.” The voice tensed. “But I made the payments.”

  “How long has she been gone?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Were you having any troubles? In the marriage?”

  “I’d rather tell it to the investigator, miss.”

  I put my fingers to my temple and closed my eyes. “I’m the investigator, sir.”

  There was a short laugh and then a pause. “Well,” he said. “No, you’re joking.”

  “I’m not. As the advertisement says, I’m trained in counter—”

  The line clicked off. I set the phone in the cradle and took a short walk out of the office, down the hall to the service elevator at the back, and then back to the office again. I decided to draw no conclusions whatsoever from what had just happened. I took up my post at the desk again, then changed my mind, went down to the street for a cup of coffee from a cart and the Daily News, and came back up. The next day went by the same way. I was becoming very well versed in current events. Then the day after that, and the day after that. Just after I got home in the evening, my next-door neighbor called to say that squirrels were coming from my roof onto his roof and chewing holes into his attic. I told him I didn’t know what I could do about it, since the squirrels hadn’t asked me for an easement and my efforts to broker a deal with them regarding my own attic had been unsuccessful. He told me that he considered me a bad neighbor, principally because of my weak character, which was creating a squirrel problem that would, in time, stretch up and down the block and doom the neighborhood. I hung up the phone, expressing my regrets and good wishes. I slept badly, thinking about my roof, which had a new leak despite having been fixed just after I bought the house.